It's hard for many of us to trust the studies that seem to come out on a daily basis covering a variety of topics. You can find studies on the same subject that come down on completely different sides of the topic depending on who funded them. You might expect a study commissioned by the European Commission (EC) to be made public no matter what the results were, but that certainly wasn't the case with an EC study conducted back in 2015 looking into a link between digital piracy and the decline in legal sales.

Why was the report unpublished to the public for two years? The reason is simple: the study found no link between illegal downloads and a reduction in legitimate purchases of digital goods across several categories. In fact, the study found that sales of games specifically increased in the face of piracy. The takeaway with that little factoid is that developers putting microtransactions into their games has led pirates to actually buy the games they download illegally.

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The final takeaway of the report is that there is no robust statistical evidence that piracy costs content makers sales. The real concern for many here is that the EC sat on the results for two years because the study didn't fit the narrative it wanted to draw of piracy being a menace and costing companies money, and thereby workers' jobs. In fact, the only reason we even know about this study now is because of an official request by a member of the EU called Julia Reda.